Manu
Just A Test Title OK
- Joined
- Aug 24, 1999
- Posts
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This is an update on the story voting issues that several Literotica authors reported to us in late March.
When we rolled out the new Story Page interface on March 20, 2021, it also updated several of our anti-fraud systems. Those systems, while tested on users participating in the BETA program, did not react exactly as expected once they were exposed to millions of users. We noticed the problem pretty quickly and took steps to fix the issues. When fixing things on the live site, we have to be extremely careful, so it took several days. We believe that the original issue was resolved by the 27th.
The above issue led to the unintended removal of some historical votes for stories whose voting profile met specific criteria. Since we had backups from just before the rollout, we were able to restore all of the votes that may have been incorrectly removed. The process of vote restoration also took several days to complete.
Adding to the complexity of the issue, some votes that were restored were votes that had previously been removed by our fraud detection systems. Because of this, we had to disable the fraud protection systems during the restoration (so that we were sure everything was restored without conflicts). Once we had historical votes restored, and the system appeared to be working as expected, we were able to reactivated the fraud detection systems.
The result of all of this is that you may have seen some wild swings in vote totals and scores starting around March 20th. We are now behind on fraud sweeps, so you may see more swings in early April as we try to get caught up. There may also have been less votes than expected on Lit stories from about March 20th through March 27th, while we were working on the original issue.
We apologize to all Lit Authors for the issues after the rollout. We've learned a lot from this experience and hopefully those lessons will help us to prevent it from happening again. The rollout of the new Story Page was always going to be a challenge, so we're happy that it's out now and we can work on fine-tuning it.
There are other questions we've heard from authors about whether the new voting block design could be causing readers to vote higher or lower, whether vote scores are higher or lower on average with the new story page design, etc. Those are all good questions, but not ones that we have answers to yet. We are monitoring the scores and the vote totals, but we need more time to see what it looks like after more of the historical fraud votes have been removed. Hopefully we can share another update soon.
If you notice problems with the voting or any other part of the new Story Page, please contact us anytime. We are working through a number of smaller issues, especially with less popular browsers, but big issues like voting are our priority.
Thank you for all of your support during this update, sorry again for the confusion, and thank you for being part of Lit!
When we rolled out the new Story Page interface on March 20, 2021, it also updated several of our anti-fraud systems. Those systems, while tested on users participating in the BETA program, did not react exactly as expected once they were exposed to millions of users. We noticed the problem pretty quickly and took steps to fix the issues. When fixing things on the live site, we have to be extremely careful, so it took several days. We believe that the original issue was resolved by the 27th.
The above issue led to the unintended removal of some historical votes for stories whose voting profile met specific criteria. Since we had backups from just before the rollout, we were able to restore all of the votes that may have been incorrectly removed. The process of vote restoration also took several days to complete.
Adding to the complexity of the issue, some votes that were restored were votes that had previously been removed by our fraud detection systems. Because of this, we had to disable the fraud protection systems during the restoration (so that we were sure everything was restored without conflicts). Once we had historical votes restored, and the system appeared to be working as expected, we were able to reactivated the fraud detection systems.
The result of all of this is that you may have seen some wild swings in vote totals and scores starting around March 20th. We are now behind on fraud sweeps, so you may see more swings in early April as we try to get caught up. There may also have been less votes than expected on Lit stories from about March 20th through March 27th, while we were working on the original issue.
We apologize to all Lit Authors for the issues after the rollout. We've learned a lot from this experience and hopefully those lessons will help us to prevent it from happening again. The rollout of the new Story Page was always going to be a challenge, so we're happy that it's out now and we can work on fine-tuning it.
There are other questions we've heard from authors about whether the new voting block design could be causing readers to vote higher or lower, whether vote scores are higher or lower on average with the new story page design, etc. Those are all good questions, but not ones that we have answers to yet. We are monitoring the scores and the vote totals, but we need more time to see what it looks like after more of the historical fraud votes have been removed. Hopefully we can share another update soon.
If you notice problems with the voting or any other part of the new Story Page, please contact us anytime. We are working through a number of smaller issues, especially with less popular browsers, but big issues like voting are our priority.
Thank you for all of your support during this update, sorry again for the confusion, and thank you for being part of Lit!
